How I Broke Through The Great Firewall of China

As many of you know, I’m in Shanghai, China for spring break. The last time I was here, the great firewall of China wasn’t much of a problem. Most of the sites that I used were accessible and available. This time around, most of those sites are completely blocked off.

I have no access to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Hootsuite, and a host of affiliate networks are blocked as well, including Clickbank.

What I did to get around this problem was by setting up a remote computer back in California and using that computer to log into all the blocked sites. The program I used to do this is call Team Viewer.

teamviewer

Team Viewer sets up a virtual desktop on my local desktop so I can control the remote computer as if I was there. Because the remote computer is outside China’s great firewall, it can access any blocked sites. That’s how I’ve been updating my Facebook and Twitter feeds.

For the recent YouTube video of Sally and I at the top of the Pearl Radio Tower, I had to transfer the video from my Macbook to the remote computer, and then have the remote computer upload the video to YouTube. This was a real headache to say the least because the Internet here is not very fast.

I really don’t understand the thought process China goes through in deciding what sites to block and what sites to let in. While I wasn’t shocked that Facebook was blocked, I was kinda surprised that CNN was freely available. I guess the fact that CNN is english only might have something to do with it. At any rate, I’m not letting any great firewall stop me from making money online!